I am delighted to report that Richard Bales, Professor at Northern Kentucky Law School, and someone who I consider to be a friend, has just been named Dean at Ohio Northern Law School.

Readers should all be familar with Professor Bales. He is the editor of Workplace Prof Blog and an accomplished scholar whom I look to often. A press release from Ohio Northern University which provides a summary of Prof. Bales' career is available here.

To Place Graduates, Law Schools Are Opening Firms is an interesting March 7, 2013 New York Times article. Because the job market is so difficult for newly minted lawyers, some schools are formering law firms paying their former students little or no pay.

Is this a good idea? Of course it is. But, the full-time doctrinal faculty will not be appearing in those clincs. Why? Because most do not know how to practice law. Law school needs to change and start hiring faculty that knows how to practice law.

This study asked two questions about the relative influence of student capability (as measured by LSAT scores) and faculty expertise (as measured by citations in law journals for faculty publications) for increasing a law school’s prestige (as measured by ranking in U.S. News) and passage rates on the bar examination for their graduates.Likewise, several shortcomings in the previous literature were addressed: (1) researchers have either investigated the relationship of student understanding of the law to prestige or examined faculty expertise to this outcome, but none explored the effects of one of thesepredictors with the effects of the other removed (partial correlation), (2) researchers have correlated various student measures to bar passing rates for law schools across the country but this presents interpretative difficulties because the types of tests given for each bar examination, and the scores needed to pass, have considerable variation acrossjurisdictions, and (3) several studies have assessed the influence of faculty scholarship to prestige, but no study has assessed the influence of scholarship to bar passage rates. The results of this study indicate that prestige is likely a function of the reciprocal relationship between student capability and faculty expertise. To determine which camefirst, better students attracting more well-known professors or well-known professors attracting better students, is a chicken and egg problem. With respect to passing the bar, the analysis indicates faculty expertise is more influential than student capability in promoting higher passing percentages, at least in California and New York. Based on these findings, increasing the number of faculty with recognized expertise in an area of law will raise a school’s prestige at least as much as encouraging students with high LSAT scores to enroll, and will have the added benefit of increasing the percentage of graduates passing the bar. This recommendation does not apply to law schools where bar passage rates are very high or where a high percentage of professors eminent in law are already in the department.

This Friday the University of Virginia's Carter Woodson Institute is hosting a symposium on the question, "Does Reparations Have a Future?" I suppose the short answer is that people are continuing to use
reparations talk as a way of organizing their thoughts and actions
around racial justice -- even as the case for reparations has been
largely defeated in the courts and in legislatures.

An ABA Task Force has been set up and is expected to make major recommendations about law school education. An interesting New York Times article discussing this task force and some possible changes can be found here.

Professor Doug Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy commented this morning on what promises to be a very timely and important symposium upcoming at Duquesne Law School. The syposium is called "Plea Bargaining After Lafler and Frye" and will be held February 28-March 1 at Duquesne in Pittsburgh in cooperation with the Criminal Justice Section, White Collar Crimes Committee, Mid-Atlantic Region. The symposium schedule is here.

At least two Texas legislators, Rep. Eddie Lucio, III of Harlingen and Rep. Armando Martinez of Weslaco, have filedbills to establish a public law school in the Rio Grande Valley. The two bills are similar to one another - the primary difference is that Lucio's bill would place the law school in the University of Texas System, while Martinez's bill would authorize the school to be created and operated by any willing and existing university system.

A law school in the fast-growing Rio Grande Valley has long been a goal for South Texas's legislative delegation. While the need for a new law school in this national market is doubtful, the Rio Grande Valley is greatly underserved. The nearest public law school to the Valley is the University of Texas at Austin some 300 miles away. The Rio Grande Valley appears by far to be the largest region in the nation, measured by population, located so far from a public law school. The two MSA's that make up the Valley have almost 1.2 million in population according to the last Census.

Texas created a public law school in the Dallas during the 2009 session - the University of North Texas Dallas (UNT-Dallas) College of Law is scheduled to open in the Fall of 2014. With law schools facing declining enrollment in this tough job market, getting yet another law school opened in Texas looks to be an uphill battle this session.

The Texas Legislature meets for 140 days during odd-numbered years, called special sessions excluded.

A series of cases have recently been filed alleging that law schools have mislead student applicants. Most of these cases have been dismissed, but now comes word via an article in the National Law Journal, that one has survived a motion to dismiss, here. As the article states:

The fraud lawsuit against the Thomas Jefferson School of Law lives on.

A San Diego judge declined to dismiss the case — the first in a wave of suits brought by recent law graduates who claim their alma maters misled them with overly rosy assurances about their postgraduate job prospects.

Those suits have not fared well in court; five have been dismissed since March. However, as of the ruling in San Diego, three cases against California law schools have survived motions to dismiss.

Gomez-Jimenez v. New York Law School, ____A.D.3d____(1st Dept. Dec. 20, 2012), is an important case which we reported on earlier. It is one in a series of cases challenging reporting practices of law schools across the cournty with respect to employment data. Plaintiff's theory was basically that New York Law School's published statistics were fraudlent and misleading. While the court affirmed the motion to dismiss against New York Law School, it did say some things which greatly trouble me as a member of the adjunct faculty at this school. Specifically, the court stated:

While we are troubled by the unquestionably less than candid and incomplete nature of defendant's disclosures, a party does not violate GBL 349 by simply publishing truthful information and allowing consumers to make their own assumptions about the nature of the information (see Andre Strishak & Assoc. v Hewlett Packard Co. 300 AD2d 608, 609-610 [2nd Dept 2002]; St. Patrick's Home for Aged & Infirm v Laticrete Intl., 264 AD2d 652, 655-656 [1st Dept 1999]; see also Corcino v Filstein, 32 AD3d 201, 202 [1st Dept 2006]). Accordingly, we find that defendant's disclosures were not materially deceptive or misleading (id.). . . .

We are not unsympathetic to plaintiffs' concerns. We recognize that students may be susceptible to misrepresentations by law school. As such, "[t]his Court does not necessarily agree [with Supreme Court] that [all] college graduates are particularly sophisticated in making career or business decisions" (MacDonald, 2012 WL 2994107, at *10). As a result, they sometimes make decisions to yoke themselves and their spouses and/or their children to a crushing burden because the schools have made misleading representations that give the impression that a full time job is easily obtainable when in fact it is not.

Given this reality, it is important to remember that the practice of law is a noble profession that takes pride in its high ethical standards. Indeed, in order to join and continue to enjoy the privilege of being an active member of the legal profession, every prospective and active member of the profession is called upon to demonstrate candor and honesty. This requirement is not a trivial one. For the profession to continue to ensure that its members remain candid and honest public servants, all segments of the profession must work in concert to instill the importance of those values. "In the last analysis, the law is what the lawyers are. And the law and the lawyers are what the law schools make them."[FN3] Defendant and its peers owe prospective students more than just barebones compliance with their legal obligations. Defendant and its peers are educational not-for-profit institutions [FN4]. They should be dedicated to advancing the public welfare [FN5]. In that vein, defendant and its peers have at least an ethical [*6]obligation of absolute candor to their prospective students.

I am not involved in this case and I only know what I read. I have been at New York Law School for about 8 years and everyone has gone out of their way to serve and help students. I do not believe that anyone would intentionally mislead a student. Perhaps, this is why I find the court's language troubling-deeply troubling. As adjunct professors, we do not get to go to faculty meetings and we are not kept informed about the governance of the school, and that is very unfortunate. I would hope that New York Law School puts out some communication explaining its position.

This is a tough time to be a law school dean. Consider Vermont Law School dean Marc Mihaly, who only four months into the job, is now facing a $3.3 million budget deficit. With a 14% projected revenue decline on the horizon, Mihaly has announced a voluntary buyout for VLS staff which he says could be extended to faculty if there are not enough takers. He also announced that VLS will increase its LL.M program and certificate offerings to make up for the revenue loss. Taja-Nia Henderson at Concurring Opinions, has some interesting comments on the problems and risks associated with law school faculty buyout programs.

Ten new law schools that are either ABA accredited or seeking accreditation have opened the doors in the last ten years with new schools in Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana and Texas planning to open. With enrollment declining and legal jobs paying enough to reasonably retire law school debt harder to find, it seems obvious that some industry restructuring, including possible consolidation or school closure, will occur. We can expect more stories such as the ones coming out of Vermont and Pennsylvania as this process unwinds.

There has been much written in the blogosphere about Steven M. Davidoff's essay in the New York Times earlier this week as well as to Paul Campos's response to it, and I do not have much to add other than to say that I have just read the online comments to the Davidoff piece and I found there a substantially positive review for the value that adjunct faculty brings to the overall law school educational experience. This seems worth observing here, this being the Adjunct Law Profs Blog and all.

Santa Clara Law Professor recently posted both is tenure application and his application to be promoted to full professor online. It is available here. I must admit that I have never seen this type of information before and I assume that many readers also have not seen this type of material. While I understand the need to keep personnel type information confidential, posting information like this is helpful for comparision purposes.

There are two lessons the University of La Verne and UC-Irvine
provide us. The first is that there is no "responsible" way to create a
law school that doesn't involve creating unemployed graduates. Either
the law school will take in students it knows will either not find law
jobs or won't even pass a bar exam (La Verne), or it will force another
law school somewhere else to do the same (UC-Irvine).

The second
and more significant lesson, which is more closely associated with
UC-Irvine than La Verne: We are slowly approaching the endgame for
public law schools. Once state governments no longer consider training
lawyers a public good, by cutting subsidies, public law schools mutate
into vestigial state structures whose agendas are orthogonal to any
public purpose, unless using their students' tuition for other
university programs counts. They should either be privatized or closed.

I am not entirely convinced by Leichter's arguments but I find them to be interesting and worth further thought. I also learned a new word -- "orthogonal."

A Santa Clara Law Professor recently posted both is tenure application and his application to be promoted to full professor online. It is available here. I must admit that I have never seen this type of information before and I assume that many readers also have not seen this type of material. While I understand the need to keep personnel type information confidential, posting information like this is helpful for comparision purposes.

Abolish the Law Reviews! is an interesting July 5, 2012 article from The Atlantic by Walter Olson. He makes the familar arguments that law schools take too much time to publish and serve only the needs of the faculty. Olson favors online scholarship, such as blog posts instead.

While Olson and others have somewhat of a point, I would not go so far as to abolish the law reviews. They serve a purpose at law school. It is called training law students how to write. More fundamentally, what is wrong with law reviews today is that they focus on legal theory. Law School should teach law students how to practice law.

Unfortunately, look at any law school today. You will see that there are very few professors hired in the last 10 years or so that has any material amount of practice experience. Law schools are too busy chasing the prestige of an Ivy league Phd (in addition the the required JD). Because so few professors have practical experience, they often write about things that no body cares about.

The solution is to ONLY hire professors with significant experience and ONLY hire professors who can teach. Publications should be related to practice. Law schools can save money and time by only publishing articles online. Many law schools do that now, but not for their main stream law review.

Wake up law schools, we are in the 21st Century! ABA are you listening. You need to wake up and change the ABA Standards NOW.

An August 8, 2012 article from the National Law Journal, here, indicates that the ABA and other bar associations are studying legal education.

Reform is badly needed. Law schools are run by professors who, for the most part, are not competent to practice law. Yes, they are bright and have those ivory degrees. But, how many of them ever represented a client, performed a deposition or answered a complaint?? Sadly, law schools today are not concerned with hiring professors with experience. They are more insterested in having their faculty produce law review articles that no one reads.

Think I am joking. Pick a law school and pick a professor hired within the last 10 days. Do a lexis or westlaw search and take a look at how many cases they made an appearance in. Amicus briefs do not count. Amicus briefs for professors are better than nothing, but just barely. I will give you one better. Take a look at the faculty in your school. How many of the professors are not even admitted to the bar in the state where the law school is located? States like NJ, where law professors (but not college professors) can waive in do not count.